Aspects of Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain‪.‬

This Introduction provides background to the more focused essays that follow. It calls attention to the continued neglect of the nineteenth-century platform, and especially--in the wake of Meisel's recent study of the political platform--of the lecture, pointing out that the extent to which oral performance underpinned written text in the Victorian period is still too little understood. It attempts a chronological survey designed to emphasize the significance of public speech in the era before the 1860s. It also seeks to provide context for a number of the key themes of the essays in the rest of the issue, arguing for the importance of the platform for transatlantic cultural exchange, and suggesting that despite the pressures, women were not completely banished from the mid-century platform as has sometimes been suggested. **********